Homecomings
by Mark of the Asphodel
Summary: The knight with no lord, no country, and no honor meets at last the pursuer determined to bring him to his reckoning. Abel, Catria, and the final laying to rest of old ghosts. Post-FE3.
1. Chapter One: Guilt

**Homecomings**

_Disclaimer: I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters._

_Warnings: This takes place a very long time after the game. A lot of canon characters are dead, some of them in ways that are not very nice. All pairings herein are canon, or at least enough so to pass. Spoilers for FE3: Monshou no Nazo; knowledge of FE3 may be a plus in reading this. This 'fic has a prequel, "Forsaken," but both stories are intended as stand-alones._

*****

**Chapter One: Guilt**

_I don't claim to be guilty-- guilty's too grand_

They called it Old Abel's Bench. After he'd been there for three summers, the villagers of Hekla even put a small brass plaque on the back of the bench, just to let visitors know for certain this was Old Abel's favorite spot. So, if he had nothing else to his name, there at least was one place left in Archanea for him to rest. His bedroom at Father Asgrimur's house did not count as a place of his own. As a veteran of the Great Wars, he was entitled to the charity, and he was not allowed to turn it down. It was accept aid or die in the street of this tidy fishing village, and the villagers would not permit the latter. So he lived his days in the house of the local priest, half prisoner and half honored guest. When he thought it over-- and he had nothing now but time to think his life over-- Abel felt that this sort of sentence really was appropriate. Exile in this archipelago so isolated it was termed the Lonely Isles, under the watchful eye of Father Asgrimur... no, a better punishment could not have been devised. Time and fate managed what temporal justice could not, and conspired to have an old traitor wither away at the edge of the kingdom.

In truth, he doubted he could survive another winter in this clime. The prospect had ceased to bother him much. Seven years he'd been there now, watching the gray seas lash at this isolated heap of rocks. Seven years in which time seemed to slow, then stop entirely, and he lived the same day over and over. Seven years of remaining still while the fishermen cast their nets and the foreigners in their long boats came ashore to do business with fur-traders. From his bench, he watched the foreigners with dim eyes; not a few years earlier, he'd have gone up to them, asked them their origins, then asked of them that eternal searing question.

_This woman, have you seen her?_ And he would take from his belt-pouch a sketch in made many years before. _She is a little more than five feet in height, small-boned and very slender. She comes from Macedon, but knows the Common Tongue as well as her own language. Her smile and her laugh are both beautiful. Her name is Est, and she is my wife._

He no longer asked the question aloud, though it burned in his heart. The sketch of his lost love remained tucked away out of sight, and he let the foreigners pass without accosting any.

Yet time and fate, it seemed, had one more trial for Abel, onetime knight of the Kingdom of Altea. Her voice attracted his attention first; it broke through the steady flow of re-lived memory as he sat on his bench beneath the weak northern sun. Low and clear, it had a strain of music in it, one that conjured up memories of olive groves and thyme-scented meadows, white marble under the moonlight and great mountains rising from the blue southern seas. It was an echo of the voice he still heard in his daydreams. Abel raised his head to follow that voice, and so he saw her.

It was no delusion. Four decades on, he still knew her small, trim figure. The short, glossy hair was shot through with feathers of white and gray, but that was no surprise.

Her voice was lower than he remembered, and considerably more harsh. That, too, failed to bother him. Only when she turned, and he caught sight of her face, did he feel the true shock of the years. Catria the White was nineteen no longer. To see her bright-blue eyes set in a face darkened by the sun and creased by the wind provoked in him more than animal revulsion; it was the same feeling a good man might experience upon seeing a shrine despoiled.

_Est would look that way_, he thought. He had often tried to imagine how his wife would now look, but always the image of her remained elusively girlish; his concept of an aging Est more resembled the silver-haired maidens one encountered from time to time. The reality of Catria grown old shattered his vague conception of what Est might be in this era. Est might have those sun-spots on her hands, Est would have lined skin drawn tight across her collarbone, Est would have those spiderweb veins in her neck....

Yet Catria remained herself, bold and proud and strong. In his other lifetime, that long-vanished life in which he'd been a noble knight and she'd been his comrade-at-arms, he would have been grateful to see her. Steady, reliable Catria, now closing in on him, her eyes alight with a predator's gleam. Catria, whose path had _almost _crossed with his so many times during the years that divided them. Her short-sword remained in its scabbard, but it was not necessary. She moved with the vigor of a woman far younger, while he had trouble even standing unaided. Abel did not attempt to evade her; he remained on his bench like a man already wounded and awaiting the Harvester of Souls. It _would_ be the middle sister to find him, he thought. Not the one who took him as her husband, not the one who was his dear friend, but the one whose heart and loyalties lay elsewhere. From her, he could expect no mercy.

Not that he wanted any such thing.

"You have me now," he whispered, an echo of her old battle cry.

"As is fitting. I promised I'd be the one to find you," she said, and traced the scar that ran down from the base of his left ear. "And, unlike you, I've never breached a promise made to my king."

In that other lifetime, he would have lifted a skeptical eyebrow and asked her how she reckoned that statement with her rebellion against Michalis. But they both knew Michalis of Macedon wasn't the king that Catria had in mind.

"Unfortunately, the reward for your return has long since been rescinded. You are no longer a person of interest to the Crown." The corners of her mouth quirked up in a smile that once had heralded the infamous three-fold attack of the Whitewinged Sisters. "Yet, strangely, you remain a person of deep interest to me, Brother Abel."

*

Father Asgrimur was very honored to leave his guest in the care of the distinguished Knight Commander. The memory of the man called the Hero King flourished even in this distant fringe of the kingdom he had forged, and to have the fabled Knight Commander, she who had been to the king as his own left hand.... well, the priest was beside himself at the honor. So Abel was released at last, released like a prisoner passed in custody from one captor to another.

"Don't offer me your apologies," Catria said; even in a verbal match, she had to strike first. "Apologize to the dead, if you must, but I don't need to hear it."

He had no apologies for her, or for anyone else. He did thank Father Asgrimur as the priest handed Abel the sack containing his worldly goods. The priest sent him off with a blessing, as though Abel were headed to a better place than the one he was leaving. Abel had no illusions in this regard.

"I am not bringing you back because I pity you," said his new warden. "I keep my promises." And she strapped him to the back of her dragon and carried him away from the Lonely Isles. Abel felt no grief as he looked back on the place he'd lived for so many years; it never was home. Home did not exist, he told himself. Home was a little house with a little shop on a modest street of Altea Town, a house with rose-bushes outside and Est within. Home disappeared when the first rock came through his window, disappeared when Est unwrapped the paper wadded around that rock and read aloud the message "TRAITOR" to him. Catria was not bringing him anywhere except another way-station of his exile.

"In light of your advanced state of decay, we'll take warp points down to Khadein," Catria shouted at him as they soared above the white-capped Northern Ocean.

"Warp points?" His voice must not have been loud enough, as she did not answer him. Back on the mainland, on a curving peninsula that jutted like a flipper from the northeastern lobe of the continent, they stopped at a temple dedicated to a local water deity. Abel had vague memories of the temple, as he'd passed through it on the journey that led to his extended stay on Hekla. He had not visited the large pavilion to which Catria now led him; he just had time to realize that its mosaic floor formed the star design of a warp spell when his body began to disintegrate.

Abel felt his innards twist as his body came back together. He'd felt the immense strain of a long-distance warp before in his life, during the surreal trip from Macedon to Thabes to Dolhr. He'd been surprised then to have all his fingers and toes still attached upon arrival, and to have his viscera inside his body rather than dangling out. That, however, had not been nearly as _painful_ as this. Behind him, Catria's war-dragon moaned; Abel glanced at his keeper to see how she fared. She looked as though she'd tasted a bitter orange while expecting a sweet one.

"Eh," she spat. "Horrible."

"Do people do this often?"

"When speed counts, they do. The system was set up for diplomats and the military, not for holiday jaunts."

"The military?"

"If any region of the kingdom suffers attack, aerial troops can be mobilized within three hours," Catria said, and a familiar touch of pride brightened her face. "Well, rest up for an hour or so, and then it's on to Khadein."

"Where is this place, then?" Abel tried to remember what command Catria had given the temple attendant before the warp, but it seemed he was at least missing a few seconds of memory.

"The New Temple at Thabes. I'm not surprised you don't recognize it; it was only consecrated a few years ago."

"Ah." Abel truly looked then at his surroundings; the walls and windows of the temple were adorned in a way that did seem peculiar to him. The content of the artwork was traditional-- the war between dragons and men, the founding of Archanea, the first rise of Dolhr, and so on-- but the colors and the design were odd. It was modern, he supposed, and at the back of it all he simply didn't care. "Do people get lost this way? I mean, does everyone always have their body come back together properly?"

"We haven't lost anyone yet. The magical community is divided on whether over-reliance on warp magic weakens the body and leads one to a premature demise," she said. "In your case, I don't think the odds are against us."

Her own face was its normal color again. Abel watched Catria as she soothed her dragon; the beast didn't seem to have appreciated their shortcut much, either. Neither the dragon nor Abel liked the second warp, which spirited them to Khadein, any better.

"It's a nice hop from here to Altea, not worth the trouble of warp magic," Catria said as she helped Abel to put his riding-harness back on. Abel nodded in mute reply; the distance between the Khadein citadel and Altea Castle was comparatively short as the dragon flew. Though separated by water, sand, and culture, they were the closest in distance of any major cities on Archanea. In his mind's eye, Abel could see the straight lines drawn as though on a map, and something about this familiar geometry was oddly exciting. He tried to quash that feeling, and reminded himself that he was _not_ going home. The Altea he remembered from the early years of the century was a place from a dream, and he could have no expectation of return. And yet, as they reached the coast of Khadein, he could not keep his heart from quickening. The sparkling waters of the Khadein Channel had meant something once; they'd been the final boundary crossed before retaking Altea from the Dolhr-Grust alliance. Abel struggled to keep his emotions flat and dead, and yet he stared, and stared, until he saw it-- the White Coast, sheer pale cliffs rising out of the water. Altea, the garden of the Western Isles, the land of golden apples, the jewel set in a silver sea.

As they flew closer, Abel saw that the timeless coastline was changed; he counted a dozen new strange towers upon the bluffs, octagonal structures of wood topped with spinning blades.

"Are they some kind of defense?"

"They're windmills, Abel."

"What purpose do they serve?" He could only imagine them to be some method of warding off enemy dragoons.

"Power," she said. "Wind powers most of the mills in Altea now."

"Where did the idea come from?"

"Merric was involved," she said in a vague manner that seemed to him deliberate. "I'm sure you can guess the rest if you give it some thought."

Abel had given no thought at all to the frail, cheerful youth who'd earned himself the name Master of the Winds, not for many years. He did not understand Catria in the least. She had no further explanation for him as they continued south toward the heart of the island. The land was blanketed with the flat gray clouds that were the mark of that season; the sensation of the wet air on his face stirred Abel's heart more than anything he'd heard or seen thus far. Some things, at least, hadn't changed; late-summer rains still kissed the fertile Altean soil. Catria took them down through a hole in the clouds, and so Abel had his first glimpse of the land itself, of the orchards and the fields of ripening grain. And, so it happened, of the capital. Shafts of sunlight pierced the fog, outlining what seemed to be a palace of pure light. The old castle was swallowed up by a vast complex of gleaming marble. The stone tower Abel had twice fled and twice captured now appeared to frown upon the newer structures around it. It was like one of those fantastic dishes served at a banquet, half a suckling pig sewn to a fowl.

"When was all this done?"

"Well, the old place looked a bit ragged and gloomy after the wars. Besides, when Her Majesty came over from Valencia, she wanted something a bit more cheerful."

Valencia. One of the many places Abel had always meant to see, but never managed the journey. It had taken him too long, and taken too much out of him, just to travel across the continent of Archanea. The phantasm of paths never taken haunted him for a moment, but when he again looked down at the ground, all thought of lost Valencia was jarred out of his mind. He knew the landscape of Altea intimately, could draw a map of his motherland from memory. He'd scribbled such maps many times over-- on scraps of parchment, table-tops, and in the dust. It all was fixed in his mind: the sinuous curves of the bays and estuaries, the narrow bridge to Gra in the east, the castle west of that, and then the Twin Villages. Abel knew the terrain as well as he knew the veins and seams of his own hand.

He did not recognize the country beneath him now. The outline was there, the rivers and the glittering sea, but the _land_ had undergone transformation. The Twin Villages were now a single mass of buildings and people; Altea Town itself flowed into Javea Town like two beads of quicksilver becoming one.

"Welcome to Altea City," she said as they swooped low.

"There must be hundreds of thousands of people here now."

"The last census had a little over a million," Catria said, in the dry tone she might use to report on the weather.

"A million." Even Pales didn't number a million residents, not after the wars. Not that Abel remembered. The population of all Archanea at the turn of the century had been... was it forty million? Or fifty? "How is that even possible?"

"Refugees flooded in after the War of Heroes. They reckoned Altea might be rebuilt a bit faster than the surrounding nations, and they were right." That strange prideful smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "People also tended to large families after the war."

"War of Heroes?"

"Oh. That's the _correct_ name for what we called Emperor Hardin's War."

Her teeth, Abel noted absently, were still white and appeared almost sharp. She clicked them for emphasis when she spoke, as an irritated horse would chomp at the bit.

Catria took them down at the outskirts of Altea City. A small knot of onlookers, drawn by the sight of the war-dragon, already waited there. These women and children greeted Catria as a returning heroine.

"Welcome home, Commander!"

_Home_. Abel had never in all his life thought of Altea as Catria's home. She was Catria of the Whitewinged Order of Macedon, and her home lay still further to the south, beyond the sparkling blue waters of the Raman Sea.

"Who's the gentleman, then, Commander?" one lad of twelve or so called.

"A visitor from the Lonely Isles." Catria spoke the lie as easily as she breathed, but then again it wasn't truly a lie. Abel held silence and let Catria do all of the talking; better to let these people think him a barbarian unschooled in the Common Tongue than to have them find out he was a native son of Altea.

*

Catria did not take Abel to her house, if truly she kept residence in Altea. She found him a cottage by the sea, in a small village reminiscent of the towns of his youth. There was a baker's and a butcher's, a tanner's, a smithy, and an apothecary's shop. A single healer, a motherly cleric, tended a simple shrine and burial ground. His cottage had but three rooms, enough to serve his basic needs-- a place to sleep, and to break his fast, and to sit and gaze at the walls.

"This is not charity," she said to him, and her voice was as sharp then as her lance-head. "You are my charge."

He could not argue with her duty any more than he could argue with the compassion of Father Asgrimur. To place oneself between Catria and her duty had always been suicide, and while it was tempting to imagine himself obliterated by Catria's will, Abel knew she wouldn't grant him the mercy of literal death. He would have to wait for it, as he'd waited out the years in Hekla, forever in a state of longing without hope.

Abel was received warmly by the people of Denia, and in truth he felt oddly comfortable there. It was, in many ways, a fragment of what Altea Town had been in his youth, back when he was merely the attractive and clever son of the town cleric, a boy destined for something beyond the village walls. He had a plausible story for the townspeople-- he was but another old soldier who traveled widely after the War of Heroes, and who now in his waning days was glad to be home. Like the best lies, it hewed closely to the truth. He gave them his real name, and was as surprised as he was relieved to see no flash of recognition, no sudden burst of suspicion, in the eyes of his neighbors. Perhaps Abel the Black had simply been forgotten.

Catria came to visit at irregular intervals. She brought something different each time-- a chess set, an illustrated copy of _The Fall of Thabes_, a box of sweetmeats. Abel stared at the gem-like green plums boiled in sugar and wondered that Catria remembered, after so many years, that he was partial to green sugarplums. Catria also brought along news, though most of it was fragmentary and elliptical-- anecdotes of court squabbles between officials Abel didn't know, or snatches of overseas gossip. Abel did not know why he should be concerned about the scandal of a Valencian general who kept two wives, unless Catria meant it as some veiled insult toward him over the way he'd once been entangled with both of her sisters. Mostly, he listened to the sound of her voice, and didn't concern himself with the meaning of the words. After all the years between them, she still had enough of a Macedonian accent that hearing her speak summoned up memories-- memories of the young Catria and her sisters, ardent knights in service to the warrior princess of a long-fallen kingdom. Once the gates of memory opened, more buried thoughts fluttered up from the dark, like moths out of a rarely-opened chest. Abel found his daydreams filled not just the singular figure of Est, but with his old comrades-at-arms. Sometimes he was haunted by memories of his former lord-- not as a mighty king, but as a prince just past the threshold of childhood, accompanied always by his little playfellow the princess Caeda. More often, Abel thought of his peers: idealistic Gordin, sensible Draug, and solemn, stubborn, perplexing Cain. Men of legend, now, great knights who helped to reshape the broken world under the Hero King... yet in Abel's eyes, they too were still little more than children. Little brothers, especially Cain, who'd been to Abel what Catria had been to her elder sister Palla-- ally and rival and worth taking a killing blow for.

It would have been easy to slip into "Remember when?" around her, but Catria steadfastly refused to allow him that indulgence. Whatever place Catria called home, she did not speak of it, much less bring him over to visit. She revealed to him nothing of her past or her history, whether she'd ever married or taken a lover. At times, it amused him to imagine what she might be up to when not with him-- visiting children and grandchildren, perhaps. And working, of course, carrying out her considerable duties as Knight Commander. She certainly left the impression of a woman with a great deal upon her plate to savor; Abel knew the moments spent with him were but the crumbs.

And yet, for all that, he found himself rather glad to see her marching up to his door.

"There's a lot of bother in the streets this week," he greeted her one day when the ground was carpeted in yellow leaves and the afternoon sun dipped low in the west.

"Oh, everyone's preparing for the Star Festival." She presented him with a knitted scarf of soft wool patterned green and black. "That's from a Valencian camel. They keep herds of camels with long hair and no humps-- nasty spitting things."

"Star Festival?"

"New holiday," Catria replied, in the clipped tone she used when holding something back.

"When is it?"

"Tomorrow. I'll be taking you into town." In a slightly softer voice, she added, "If you must see anything in your life, you'll see this."

The next morning, Catria took him, with his new scarf and walking-stick, into Altea City. It seemed to Abel like the million-strong inhabitants of his former hometown had all taken to the streets. Barren tree branches fluttered with tinsel and ribbons, while the celebratory throng waved both the new flag of the Unified Kingdom and the old royal standard of Altea. A plaza that had been a simple paved space in his youth now boasted statues to Altea's heroes in every corner; in its center stood the marble figure of a boy with his sword raised to the heavens. That much Abel could discern, as the rest of the statue was smothered by chains of paper flowers in a dozen shades of blue. Abel lowered his gaze and then saw the inscription at the statue's base. Many of the letters were obscured by the heaped garlands, but he did his best to piece the message together.

N TH EL TH DAY O E ELEVE H M H O 4

CE TH AN IS FOR FR D AL OM THE GR F LHR

"Of course. Liberation Day." The eleventh day of the eleventh month, 604. How could the date have ever slipped his mind? He relieved the memory in a flash-- a banner torn down from above the Altean throne, and a new banner raised, and a boy standing at a balustrade with one hand raised to greet his people. Abel's head turned, as though of its own accord, so that he might look at the statue, at the marble sword held forever aloft.

"The statue's wrong. It was months between retaking Altea and getting our hands on Falchion."

"I know. I was there," said Catria. "Try telling anyone that and see the reaction you get."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I wasn't invited to be on the Statue Committee." The acid in her voice would have curdled fresh milk. "It's ancient history, Abel. History, or... _myth_."

"Myth," he repeated to himself. Half-truth and legend, like the tale of King Adrah and the stories of ancient Thabes. But those myths were centuries in the making, fragments of song passed from one bard to another until no one alive could untangle truth from poetic fiction. How many passing though this plaza had been there, only a few decades before, been there when that boy-prince waved to them from the heights of his recaptured castle? Abel looked down at his hands and wondered how long he'd truly been gone.

He did notice Catria had slipped, though, and called him by his name, whereas up to now she'd referred to him only as "Brother" when they were in public. They did not speak again for a time; Abel waged a silent battle in his head against a series of memories-- white pegasus feathers against white clouds, the silver flash of a rapier blade, the sensation of his own blood coursing down his neck. He glanced at Catria, and though his eyes saw the sunburnt old woman she was, his imagination saw her as she'd nearly been forever-- a girl dashed against the stones of the Dragon's Altar, eyes rolling back in her head as she mouthed the name that Abel never wanted to hear again. In this age of miracles, the dead girl on the temple floor could rise again to be the companion at his shoulder, who now hummed to herself a tune that nagged at some still more dusty corner of Abel's mind. He was on the verge of asking her to stop when a bustle in the vicinity of the royal dais drew everyone's attention.

"Ah, there's Princess Ismene. She's a good girl, brave and clever. Reminds me of someone I used to know."

Abel then asked Catria how intimately she knew the royal family these days, and she ignored him. The princess gave a speech; Abel, standing at the back of the crowd, could hardly make out a word of it. He took her in with his eyes alone, and saw the young princess had a great deal of poise and charm. She looked to be about sixteen years of age, and Abel noted a clear resemblance to Caeda in her face. He also took note of the exquisitely-worked hilt of the rapier at her belt.

"She uses a sword?" he asked Catria once the ceremony was over.

"Of course. She may be called upon to wield Falchion one day."

He just stared at her. In all the years since St. Anri founded Altea, the Sword of Light had never once been used by a woman.

"Times have changed," she said briskly.

"That much, eh?"

"Even Lord Gotoh sees the value of bending his rules now and again."

"_Sees_? Gotoh's still alive?" The man had been elderly even in 605, surely by now even the Archsage must have passed to dust.

"He's a divine dragon, Brother. Their kind don't age and die as we do. Tiki doesn't look a day above ten even now."

"Tiki. Dear gods." He had not thought of the manakete child, or her disarming and wounding innocence, in years. "Where are _they_, now?"

"Traveling," she said, again in that deliberately vague fashion. Then her face brightened, and she said in a tone that was altogether different, "The Carpenter's Guild is serving free ale, if you're interested."

"I'll take free ale," he said. It would be nice to have one thing in his stomach not paid for by Catria's graces.

"It'll be crowded," she said, as though to warn him off. "Free ale and a chance to gawk at the Hall is more than most can pass up."

He did not understand the second half of her sentence at that time. He understood well enough once they stood before the massive and ostentatious doors of the Guildhall.

"It's as large as a palace," he said.

"It's the greatest private building on the continent," she replied. "Before the wars, Altea's wealth was in its fish and soil. Trade and commerce are king now, and the carpenters princes, ever since Caeda brought over shipbuilders from Talys."

Inside, the Guildhall proved still more astonishing. The ceiling was unlike anything Abel ever had seen; it was made of tiers of interconnected arches, gilded and dripping with ornamentation.

"Is that _magic_?"

"What?" Catria looked ceiling-ward. "Oh, the roof? No, there's no magic involved."

"How did they get all that _up_ there?"

"Our carpenters are the best in the world. Now, stop asking silly questions and move along with the line."

Abel continued to glance up every few steps. The airy, gilded ceiling seemed to be floating, and it appeared impossible for such a delicate structure to hold up the weight of the roof.

A crowd of guildsmen up on an elevated platform bowed to an elderly man who wore the deep-blue robes of an Altean civil minister. The robes themselves were plain, but the golden chain around his neck gave indication of his true rank. One of the guildsmen passed a goblet, as ridiculously elaborate as the ceiling, to the minister, who sipped just enough for the sake of courtesy. Something in that carefully calibrated gestured seemed familiar to Abel somehow, as did the man's hair-- pure-white, tufted and unruly despite his high status. The truth sang out in his brain just as the minister turned in Abel's direction; Abel was far too tall to duck from the other man's gaze. He slumped his shoulders, lowered his face, and made himself as unassuming as possible. After so many years of hiding, he could be near to invisible when he needed it. He was nearly feeling safe when Catria's voice went off in his ear.

"Don't dally, Brother. There are many waiting their turn behind us."

For all that he'd anticipated the free ale, Abel hardly tasted it when it was given to him. When they reached the street again, Abel felt overcome by the noise and fatigue. His joints pained him; elbows, knees, and ankles all begged for a rest. He sank down on a granite block that served as the base to yet another grand statue, and let his walking stick fall aside. It did him little good, after all. He sat for a time, staring at the passers-by. A pair of young boys in white uniforms scurried past; one collected litter from the streets while the other swept the pavement. A street vendor shouted of "fresh-cut sticks of Sofian sugarcane" in a Grustian accent. Two dozen young girls in matching blue tunics walked past him; each girl had an identical cluster of paper flowers pinned to her shoulder. Abel watched, spellbound, as the girls marched up the steps of a building he didn't know, another built in a style he didn't recognize. Above the doors gilded letters read, "Queen Liza Memorial School for Girls."

The doors shut fast behind the last of the girls, and Abel forced himself to speak.

"Cain is alive."

"Oh, so you did see him," she said, all breezy nonchalance. "Yes, he's alive. We're not the only relics drifting around."

"He's the Chancellor?" Abel thought he recognized the chain of office with its heavy golden seal.

"And will be until he draws his last breath. He's the indispensable man of these times. Our king is _not_ the man his father was, but thanks to Cain, it doesn't much matter."

"It sounds as though he hasn't changed much," Abel said, and managed a chuckle that sounded more than a little rusted. He felt a flood of deep relief now at the knowledge that his old companion was yet a part of this world.

"All of us change, Brother. The living more so than the dead, to be fair about it." She was looking away from him, down the street back to the main plaza; Abel turned to follow her gaze and decided she was staring at the flower-bedecked statue.

"I don't think he saw me."

"You're dead to him, Abel. Best to stay that way."

She began to walk, and he had no choice but to follow, heedless of the pain in his leg. Catria took a circuitous route, as though she intended Abel to see as much of the city as possible before he was brought back home. As they went, Catria again hummed the tune to herself, and Abel once felt he was on the verge of placing it. It escaped him, though, and instead he decided to ignore Catria in favor of the wonders around him.

"Royal College of Healing," he said aloud as they passed one splendid new building. He recognized the symbol above the door to be the personal badge of Princess Elice of Altea. She had talked of founding a school, and this must surely be it.

"It's the local campus," Catria supplied. "There are branches in Aurelis and Macedon as well. Linde teaches at the College in Aurelis."

"Linde?"

"Light Mages live twice as long as the average man, did you know? To look at Linde, you'd imagine her to be no more than forty."

Abel shook his head; the Linde of his memories was half again as young, a graceful sylph with chestnut hair and a radiant complexion.

"She doesn't take on female apprentices anymore," Catria continued. "She likes the young men, Mistress Linde does."

He decided to ignore her comments.

"I was wondering... the shop, the house where Est and I lived...."

"If you wish to see the place, Abel, you'll need the courage to find it yourself. I won't take you there."

*****End Chapter One*****

_Author's Note__s_:

Well, this is the "final" installment of "Tales of the Unified Kingdom," my interconnected FE3/FEDS stories. Though chronologically last as far as the narrative goes, this is the one I started writing first, and it really can be read first. "Forsaken," which covers Abel's life up to his exile in Hekla, is the prequel to this, while "Sketches from Valencia" shows the young Catria and her sisters. Anyway, this is part one of two (and the second part is already finished... I just wanted to wait a bit between them). More detailed notes to go up on my DA account, my LJ account, and at the end of Chapter Two (Angel).

Epigraph from "The Law" by Leonard Cohen.


	2. Chapter Two: Angel

**Chapter Two: Angel**

Disclaimer: I still don't own _Fire Emblem_ or any of its characters.

* * *

_I fell with my angel down the chain of command_

Instead, she took him to a port city in the east, the very place from which Abel and the other survivors of 602 had fled to Talys. The pier he remembered was a fragment of rotting wood, but a round plaque of blue ceramic gave testimony as to this ruin's place in history. To the south, a grand new pier surrounded by sturdy vessels backed Catria's story of the importance of trade in modern Altea. Abel had seen such ships in the distance, especially from his lookout in the Lonely Isles; these ships were tall-masted, many-sailed, and one ship in particular was excessively so. The ship was the floating equivalent of the Guildhall-- so vast, so grand, so ornate in decoration that Abel was surprised any mind could conceive of such a construction, much less build one.

"Is that the royal flagship?"

"The _Heart of Talys II_," Catria affirmed. "Ten years old and the finest ship in Archanean waters. Possibly the finest in all the world."

"I didn't realize a vessel so large could even keep afloat." He wondered, too, where trees tall enough to form her masts might grow. Macedon, perhaps... he had dim memories of great forests to the south of Dolhr.

"The original _Heart of Talys_ was the flagship for the expedition to Yugdral," she said, as though it would make sense to him.

"Yugdral? What... _where_ is that?"

"Strange place. It's a continent far more vast than Archanea. Actually, I'm surprised you haven't heard of it, as your little island was probably closer to it than any other part of Archanea."

He stared at her then, as he remembered the foreigners that passed through the Lonely Isles in their curious longboats. The eternal mad question-- _Did Est go there?_-- nearly crossed his lips.

Port Colpe proved a busy place; vendors hawked everything from roasted nuts to cheap jewelry to brightly-painted pots. Abel passed them by-- he had no gold in his wallet, after all-- but he did slow down at a series of colored portraits propped up against the city wall. The style of the art was pleasing to his eye; it was thoroughly traditional, without the strange innovations that Abel suspected came from Valencia or some other foreign realm. He would have browsed through the pictures happily for as long as Catria would let him, and his eye soon settled on a portrait of three young girls riding white pegasi. For a moment, he fancied they might be Est and her sisters, and after a brief study, it dawned on him with something akin to horror that the subject matter was exactly that. Beneath the autumn sun, the colors were rich and vivid; it might have been one of his own memories, grown more intense with the years.

"How is that... possible?"

"Ah. Yes, that's a popular one," Catria said, with enough carelessness that nobody could possibly imagine _she_ was one of the girls in the picture. "The original is in Millennium Court. So's the original of that."

She pointed to a portrait of a young man on horseback, sword drawn and mantle billowing dramatically around him in a manner most impractical for actual battle.

"I reckon every household in Altea has a copy of that one," she said with feigned cheer. "That was done after we crushed the 610 rebellion in Leifcandith."

"Don't tell me the prince learned to fight on horseback." How well he remembered having to slow down his mount, to take care that the little heir of Altea wasn't left stranded and vulnerable in the tumult of battle.

"The prince may not have, but the king certainly did." She pursed her lips, though the expression was more thoughtful than sour. "But you didn't know him for that long, did you?"

Abel had developed a habit of selective deafness where Catria was concerned.

"You do not ever speak of Pales. Does the city yet exist?"

"It's still the ceremonial capital of the Unified Kingdom," she replied. "It competes with Khadein for the scholarly laurels-- the old Academy versus the new one, of course. But Altea City is where the true life of the continent makes its home."

-X-

He bought the portrait, of course, or rather Catria bought it for him. It was the first he'd looked upon Est's dear face in many a year, excepting that scribble on parchment he'd drawn himself, and he could not pass up the chance to connect with her through this bright scrap of canvas.

"Palla was the pretty one," Catria said as she ran a finger along the edge of the portrait. "Est the cute one. I... well, someone once told me I had a charming laugh."

Abel put the portrait on the wall opposite his fireplace, where he might sit and gaze upon it in the evening. He imagined guests coming to his cottage, imagined saying to them, "Ah, yes. That is my wife, when she was a girl." He never had occasion to say the words, as no guests came to his door-- save Catria, who needed to such introduction to Est. Even Catria visited him little through the winter, which proved rather more cold than Abel remembered Altean winters to be. Though, to be sure, it was less cold than the Lonely Isles.

The cold woke him by itself one morning; Abel reached out for the familiar wood of his bunk, and grasped only air. He rolled to the side then, surprised by the sudden burst of pain down his leg. He sat, and realized he did not know his location in the slightest. The spare room with its single bed resembled an infirmary, but there was no room such as this on the grounds of Castle Altea that he'd ever seen.

"Cain? Frey? Anyone?"

He began to search about the room with a rising sense of panic; he came across the face of a pretty girl scratched on an old bit of parchment, and though he didn't know her, the sight of her caused him to remember something else entirely. They'd been attacked. He must have been injured, and left behind-- unless he was somehow the only survivor.

"Sir Jagen? Cain? Someone, please answer me."

He stumbled out of the bedchamber into an adjoining room; an old woman stood there, a bundle of firewood in her arms.

"Abel, what in the name of Lord Narga are you screaming about?"

He stared at her, not knowing her face, though her voice seemed to him oddly familiar. _Ally_, he thought, and hoped to St. Anri his instinct was true.

"Where is the prince? I have to find him... we have to leave this place."

She set down the firewood and placed her small hands on his shoulders; he froze, uncertain as to whether this was an attack or an embrace of sorts.

"Abel, it's 648. _Six-forty-eight_. There's no war, no invasion, you've nothing to defend."

"I have to find...."

"The prince grew up and got married and died a long time ago. He doesn't need you any more." Catria's voice was harsh with disgust. She walked to the portrait of Est and sharply tapped the canvas. "She doesn't need you any more, either."

Abel stared at her; it seemed a mist was slowly burning away from his mind. He felt keen-witted again, but also felt shamed and horrified at himself for having lost his place in time. Catria, meanwhile, continued her lecture.

"They're pictures, Abel. They stopped being real half a lifetime ago. More than that, even."

"You're saying Est is dead, then?"

"That one in the middle looks like a cheerful girl," Catria said of her former self. "I wonder what happened to her?"

After that, Catria insisted on taking Abel out more, claiming he needed it. So it was that he saw the Crown Princess one more time, when she opened a new bridge near his own cottage. He did not press forward with the crowd to pelt the girl with flowers; he stood at a respectful distance, and watched in silence as she struck the dust from his memories with every word and gesture. Abel did _not_ think much, at first, of the Archsage that accompanied young Ismene. A princess would have a retinue, after all, and an Archsage was a fitting enough companion to the heiress of all Archanea. He took note of the elder lady only when a civilian near to Abel's own age bowed deeply before the Archsage and offered her a gift of bluebells. When Abel did truly see her, he was forced to stare; though her shoulders were bent, her hair pure white with age, all the years between them had not taken away her serenity. Abel felt his heart flutter as the deep blue eyes of the Archsage locked on his. He was caught, and by none other than the Princess of his own era. She had entrusted the life of her brother to him, so many years before. His broken vow had been made to her personally. She smiled a slow, sad smile; the blow from a pole-axe could not have hurt more. His oath of fealty had been blessed by that same smile. When she looked away, Abel thought she had done him a mercy.

Abel was short of breath when he confronted Catria after the dedication.

"You never told me Elice was still alive." It came out as an accusation.

"I said there were still a few relics like us. I don't owe you the full accounting," she said with plain unconcern. "Merric's dead, though. Some horrible wasting ailment that had him coughing up blood. I've always suspected his crazy experiments had something to do with it."

The fact of Merric's death hurt him far less than the recollection of Elice's smile.

"They got married, didn't they?" The words came out with even less interest than he felt.

"Married right after the war. Two children, five or six grandchildren these days-- I've lost count. Just like a fairytale, if fairytales involved decades of teaching schoolchildren how to blow things up. Oh, that reminds me-- you asked about the windmills before."

She launched into a story about Khadein students and their obsession with "perpetual mechanisms" and Merric's attempt to build one that would harness the power of wind.

"Well, it wasn't any kind of perpetual anything, but the king realized it could actually be useful, and so up went the windmill towers and now Altea's grain-milling capacity has multiplied by... oh, I don't remember the factor. Cain would, I'm sure. Anyway, there are more of them in Aurelis, out on the plains where the wind never seems to stop."

"Stop. Yes, please stop."

"Abel, what has gotten into you?"

For he was huddled on the ground, heedless of the pain through his bad leg, both hands pressed to his head in the manner of the madmen who heard phantom voices.

"The more I see, the more I can't stand this."

They _were_ phantom voices-- phantoms of memory. _Protect my brother, with your lives if it comes to that. See him to safety at all costs._ That memory triggered another, triggered the memory he relived more often than any other-- any, that is, besides the moment that Est and her pegasus vanished from his sight. His hand went automatically to the scar beneath his ear.

"Would that my head were stricken from its shoulders that day," he whispered. "It was no mercy to keep me alive."

Catria snorted.

"I see. You only agreed to come out of your hole because you reckoned I was the last of us, and you'd never have to face the others. You're a fool as well as a coward, Brother."

"Who else is there? Tell me, Catria, how many others are left?" He cast about in the seas of memory to speak names not uttered in years. "Lena? Ogma? Palla, what of Palla?"

"I'm sorry, Abel. You really don't deserve to know." Her face, her voice, even her eyes betrayed nothing. "We searched for you, all of us. We scoured the land from Thabes to Macedon on your behalf. These were our orders: _Abel is forgiven, pardoned, exonerated. Bring him back to me_. And one by one, the others gave up the search, until only two of us held out that we would find you again. And then, in the end, there was only me."

She crouched down before him, so her eyes were level with his, and in those eyes he saw no sympathy.

"The Crown forgave you, Abel. I never said anything about my own feelings." And yet, her voice was strangely soft, like the tone of one explaining hard truth to a small child. "I saw you aim your lance. I saw you strike. If you had drawn blood, I would have killed you with my own hands."

Abel remembered the flash of a rapier's blade, and felt again the sick certainty that he was going to die as so many cavaliers had before him, die from one swift thrust of that fragile-looking weapon.

"Many days, I _have_ regretted the mercy our lord showed you. Better to have my sister a widow than the wife of a craven traitor."

"She would have died. They planned to kill her if I took arms against the occupation."

"Better to have my sister dead than save her at the cost of all the world." Catria's voice was as smooth and unyielding as polished granite. "Est was a _knight_, Abel. She'd taken her oaths. She understood. And you, out of some blasted romantic folly, tried to 'protect' her by committing a horrible, horrible act."

He wanted to protest that Est was no knight, not by then. She was the little wife of a shopkeeper, and happier for it. Part of him doubted that Est had ever embraced the warrior code her sisters both lived by. And he'd loved her for it, loved that there was one girl in his life who would wrinkle her nose up at discussions of tactics and armaments and fortress design. One girl who would look at him with those big eyes and confess that she was glad, so very glad, that she didn't have to get up every day and kill people any longer.

"Which betrayal did she leave me for?" The words had been buried so deep within him that letting them out now pained him. "I've never known, Catria. Did she leave me because I betrayed my lord, or because I left her to die in that cell? For what I _meant_ to do, or what I _couldn't_ do?"

Catria stared at him then, and her mouth twisted in an expression he could only deem quizzical.

"Abel." She spoke slowly, gravely, as though each word were of utmost importance. "Do you believe, even for one moment, that they would have let her live?"

To hear her echo back at him the terrible doubts he'd kept deep in his heart, to hear her voice those doubts with plain and simple words, was a pain beyond measure. Ballista bolts, Elfire spells, the breath of a mage-dragon-- even _Imhullu_ hadn't felt so unbearable. No dark magic he'd known possessed the shattering power of Catria's relentless recitation.

"You'd have come back from the battle, your lance desecrated with your own lord's blood, and they would have shown you Est's corpse. And they'd have packed you off to hell before you'd finished screaming."

He wanted to contradict her, if only to say that no, they would have allowed him to live, if only to take pleasure in his agony.

"These were not misguided men of honor, Abel. These were criminals, the same strain of vermin who cheat at cards and bring re-forged weapons to the fighting arenas."

"I know that, Catria. I lived under their rule while you and your prince were playing treasure hunt at Lord Gotoh's pleasure."

He'd gone too far. Her eyes flared with something unmistakable as anything but blood-lust. How well he remembered that spark of blue flame, burning in her gaze as Catria the White sailed out to bring the unjust to their fate. In earlier times, she at least would have slapped him. Now, she leaned back on her heels, breathing heavily through her nose until the fire in her eyes smoldered low.

"What would you know of that? You, cowering like a dog in your filth, the brave knight afraid to fight, while we--" She bit on her lip to keep herself from saying any more.

"While you _what_?" He hadn't felt this reckless in years, not since in his arena-fighting days when each morning's bread was purchased with another man's life. She turned away from him, breaking eye contact, and he watched her shoulders heave for a few deep breaths.

"Through the fire and the ice," she said, sounding strangely distant. "No, you would never understand."

A veil seemed to fall between them; when it no longer appeared that Catria was truly angered, Abel pleaded with her once more.

"Catria, take me to the place where I lived."

-X-

She did, not on that day but some weeks later. Abel found himself standing before the little structure that served as his home and his domain for so brief a time. It was a shop still, a toy-shop in fact, and Abel found himself thinking of the children he and Est had talked about, had imagined fondly, but never had brought into being. There were more tangible reminders of Est, though-- the little square of stained glass with a pegasus in it was still in the upstairs window, and those were Est's own rose-bushes under the windows, he was certain of it.

Another of those blue ceramic plaques was set into the wall, next to the door.

"At this residence in 607 lived ABEL and his wife EST, knights of Altea martyred in the War of Heroes."

Abel read it twice, three times, to make sure his eyes were not failing him.

"Martyrs...." He grazed his fingertips across the smooth surface of the plaque. "Who decided we were dead?"

"Cain." Catria packed several layers of meaning into that one syllable. "I told you, he's been more or less running the country for years. One of the first things he did was to declare the both of you dead, and then put this plaque up. It was tying off a loose end, you see. Cain wanted people to move on, to quit reliving the wars. New king, new age, no need to keep fretting about who-did-what back at the turn of the century. Bury the last of the glorious dead, and stop looking askance at the neighbors."

"But all of you _knew_ we survived the war, Catria."

"And Falchion was never used to take back Altea," she replied. "I told you. I wasn't on the Statue Committee. I'm not on the Council to Register Historic Places, either. Cain takes care of that sort of thing, and I just look after the army."

They stood in silence, both gazing at the plaque and its shameless untruth, until she spoke in a fainter, softer voice.

"Your names are listed on the War Memorial...."

Something in the way her voice trailed off made the hairs stand up on Abel's arms.

"I am truly a ghost in this world."

-X-

Of all the great buildings of Altea, the Temple of Anri was the least changed. From the outside, it was just as Abel remembered. Inside, there were two major additions, one of them being the War Memorial. He would have gone there first, as his fingers longed to run across the letters of Est's name, but Catria steered him away.

"You _will_ face this, Abel." She pushed him along the aisle, past the gallery of dead kings-- St. Anri set in granite, then the sleeping statues of his lesser heirs, and down to the end of the row. The very simplicity of the tomb defied all the elaborate architecture of this age-- plain white stone, inscribed with only a name and dates, and the barest facts. No accounts of great deeds and accomplishments... Abel supposed the name spoke for itself. The sword resting atop the sarcophagus told its own part of the story.

"Falchion is just lying there in the open?"

"Lord Gotoh placed a binding spell on it, so only the rightful heir can touch it. Just try to place a hand on it; you won't even get close." She stretched out her own hand to show him the invisible barrier. "The rest of the time it stays here, where it honestly belongs."

"Has it even been used?"

"Not once. There haven't been any dragon attacks in years." There was something forced about her casual tone. "There are minor upheavals every now and again, about taxes and whatnot, but our current monarch never comes out personally. He leaves that kind of business to the knights."

Abel stared up at the ceiling. Faded banners from past campaigns drooped down, everything from the crude flags of pirates to the magnificent flag of Dark Emperor Hardin. He noted the personal standard of King Jiol of Gra, which still bore the imprint of the conqueror's boot. And there, to the left, was the banner of Dolhr, torn and singed at one corner. He remembered taking that flag down from above the Altean throne, remembered handing it personally to his prince.

"It was the most ridiculous thing," Catria said, in that artificial voice. "Some madman in the swamps east of Aurelis gathered up a little army and some weapons. Claimed he was the vessel for Emperor Hardin's soul and that he would liberate Aurelis from the yoke of Archanea. Pure foolishness. I was ordered to pacify them, but not to harm any. Well, the ringleader wouldn't surrender to anyone but the king. A word from the king, personally, and Emperor Hardin's soul would go home to rest. I brought the message back to His Majesty, unsure as to where I should go from there, and... well, he took the invitation. I think it amused him, really, to have history play out a second time as a bloodless farce."

Abel, still gazing up into the collection of victory trophies, tried to drown out Catria's recitation with his own memories, but her low voice kept breaking into his thoughts.

"The air was like poison there. All pink and green above in the twilight, and black with biting flies below. The flies didn't bother me any, as I was up above the miasma. The cavaliers and foot-soldiers were plagued by them, though. Nearly half of them were ill before we even set off on the return. Half were ill, and several died. It was something in the blood that made them reel in the saddle as though drunk, made them shake with chills in the heat of the day and burn with fever in the night. Some fought with it for weeks, others succumbed within days. He fought longer than most, but in the end...." Catria held up her hand, her thumb and index finger just a bit apart, the space of a biting fly's wingspan. "A little insect, and one drop of tainted blood, could do what the darkest forces upon Archanea failed to accomplish."

Abel didn't want to listen to her, but against his own will he remembered a dusty town along the road from Khadein to Thabes, remembered the local cleric calling all citizens together beneath the blistering sun to tell them the news that no could believe. He remembered the strange silence that fell over the assembly in the still moment before the weeping and denials, remembered the strange outrage on the faces of so many of the young, as though the gods had somehow betrayed them all.

Catria looked at the temple floor now; she dragged one foot across the mosaic, just as she'd scratched patterns in the dust so many years before.

"If I had to live my life over again, I'd kill the False Hardin on my first trip through and claim it as a suicide. But I was still young and didn't know any better, and so I spared the madman."

Abel watched her closely, watched her hard face and dry eyes, and the memory of the Dragon's Altar, of a girl's last inconsolable whisper, flickered again in his mind.

"Cain took the duty of telling the little prince his father was dead. Said he had experience with that sort of thing." Her lips twitched in a mirthless smile, and Abel felt as though time and history were folding around him like crumpled paper. "It fell to me to then explain to a seventeen-year-old boy how I'd failed to protect his father. From flies."

Abel turned away from her then, and spent a while contemplating the sarcophagus. He couldn't touch the sacred sword, had he even wanted to, but the marble itself was unprotected and he could trace the letters and numerals with his hand. 588-- he'd been five years old himself when the future king was born. Five years old, living with his mother in the small town now swallowed up by the bustling city. Such a very long time ago....

Something else bothered him about the stark design of the tomb.

"Why isn't Caeda next to him?"

"_Caeda_?" Catria raised one eyebrow in apparent surprise. "Oh, the Queen Mother is spending her golden years in Talys. I personally find the climate terrible there, but she seems used to it."

Each surprise did him additional damage. This time, Abel felt as though his chest had been kicked open. Yet he remained on his feet, his fingertips pressed to the unyielding white marble.

"Caeda... I'm sorry, Princess," he said at last, once he regained his breath. Sorry for what, he wasn't entirely sure; he was sorry, perhaps, that a great knight had shown less fortitude than a little slip of a girl.

"I told you, _she's_ not in there. If you want to give your regrets to Caeda, I can bring her a letter."

Catria's voice seemed to come from a great distance. For a moment, she seemed to leave him entirely, then Abel realized his cheek was resting against the sarcophagus.

"Get away," Catria was saying. "The bishop hates it when people come here and cry and make a mess of things."

"Do they often?" He asked without really caring.

"Old ladies do. The younger girls would rather go to the plaza and sigh over that blasted statue."

Abel straightened himself, even as he felt a sudden fluttering panic.

"Catria, tell me if Est still lives. Tell me what--"

"I don't owe that to you, Abel. I'll give to you what is owed you, and nothing more."

Her face, her voice, were as cold as the stone beneath his hands.

"You decided to hide from the world, but the rest of us kept right on living in it." For a moment, the lines of her cheek seemed to soften. "Come, I'll show you your own cenotaph."

-X-

"Dedicated to the memory of all those who gave their lives for Altea, that their sacrifice will not pass unnoticed by the generations...." Abel's eyes passed quickly over the rest of the inscription; it took several attempts for the florid preamble to register in his mind. "Cain didn't write this. Too many words."

From the corner of his eye, he saw the hint of a smile cross Catria's lips.

Abel ran down through the list top to bottom, taking in the names of old comrades. The dead of 602: the knights slaughtered by their allies at the battle of Menedy River, the trainees murdered in their bunks when the Gra garrison overran the castle, and those who sacrificed themselves so that a handful might escape the castle as it fell. The dead of the 604-605 campaign. The fallen of the 607 ambush when the combined forces of Archanea, Aurelis, and Gra converged on the castle in an attack as brutal as it was unexpected. The brave resisters who perished in the occupation, struck down in open defiance of the Emperor or tortured in prison cells. And, finally, those who fell in the 607-608 counterattack. There, near the very end of the list, was the name he'd been seeking.

_Est._

Abel ran his fingers over the grooves carved into marble, the grooves that spelled out the name he bore in his heart and his conscience. It no longer mattered to him that 608 was not-- at least as far as he knew-- the true date of her death. It was the date she had ceased to be as a person in his world, the date she passed from vivid life to misty memory. He could say at last in his heart that Est was dead, or at the very least that the Est he'd been chasing for so many years had truly had vanished from the earth. And so, of course, had he. The monument said so, in plain-graven letters.

When Catria led him from the Temple, Abel found the world to be changed. The painting in his sitting-room was no longer a portrait of his beloved wife, but simply a pleasant image of three spirited girls with their pegasi. He hoped, for the first time, that Est had moved along with the turning world, that she'd put behind the memory of her miserable traitor of a husband, that she'd found love in another's arms, and raised pretty girls of her own. He hoped that he now qualified as simply a mistake of her youth, and not as the point about which her life spun in ever-shrinking circles.

The pilgrimage to the Temple was his last journey beyond the confines of his little village. Waves of pain, of pressure, radiated through his chest and left him lightheaded and short of breath. Catria did not leave him again, and though it bothered him at first to have her cooking meals and washing his linen, he did not feel it worth the effort to argue. Abel did not know how many days passed in this manner; time no longer flowed in an orderly progression of sunrise and sunset. He had broken free of time now-- not frozen in place, not carried along on its tide, but simply floating through disconnected moments without reference to past or future.

"I'm sorry for taking you away from your duties," he said, as Catria brought him a plate of eggs and toasted bread. Breakfast, he assumed, but it might have been supper.

"Don't trouble yourself with it, Brother. I had to learn to delegate responsibilities eventually. Commander Catria is due to retire next year, and it would be improper of her not to prepare her lieutenants for the day."

"Ah. I can't imagine you ever...." He searched a while for the words. "Being still."

"There are some who wanted me gone twenty years ago," she added, not really in response to him. "Said I was too compromised to continue my duties, too tied to the old regime. But I couldn't let go the reins... I had a piece of unfinished business."

Her words hung in the air for a long moment while Abel summoned the will he needed to reply.

"What will you do now, that everything is finished?"

"I might take a holiday in Valencia. Lovely weather there, in the southern half of the continent. Less brutal in the summer than Macedon, far more pleasant in winter than Talys."

He was not really listening, nor did he care about her plans for retirement. On some level, he just enjoyed hearing her talk.

"You're remarkably handsome for a man of your age and condition," she said, and traced one cool finger along his cheek. "Good bones beneath the flesh, I suppose. Even now, I see a flicker of what my sisters did admire in you."

So like Catria, to only pay a man a compliment when he lay dying.

"Have them bury me in the paupers' field, with no stone or coffin. Just the embrace of the earth." It was no better than his long-dead comrades received after battle.

"Anonymous burial of the poor was outlawed in 622, except in cases of plague or national emergency as declared by the sovereign." She recited as though from memory.

"Ah. It seems I'm out of luck, then." He pressed his eyes shut; if the tightness in his chest grew any worse, he would be forced to ask Catria to bring the village healer, simply to relieve the pain.

"I'll find a place for you, Abel." Her fingers brushed the hair back from his forehead. "Some quiet place, by the trees and clear running water. A place where children might run, and laugh, and never notice the signs of mortality around them."

Abel fancied he could hear the trickling water, the wind stirring through green leaves. He lay a while with his eyes closed, until a familiar tune nagged at him enough that he seemed to wake up, and so felt more alert than he had in long days.

_As I went walking I saw in the field_

_Down, a-down, we go_

_A bonny young knight, layin' under his shield_

_Down, a-down, we go_

He knew the song now; it was a ballad of Talys, something he'd picked up during the Great Exile. They'd sung it on the march, he and Catria, Palla, and Cain-- sung it in the lonely hours when making a noise was the only way to keep themselves awake. Catria sang the interminable thing now, all ten verses of it. It wasn't quite the same without the other vocal parts, as something was so obviously _missing_. Abel briefly thought to join her, but it was enough of a struggle to breathe that he quickly discarded the idea. Instead, he imagined them as they were-- Cain with his hair red as flame and young face splashed with light freckles, Palla with her green eyes shining and her serious facade cracking into laughter along with her sister.

_His hounds ha' gone hunting alone in the marsh_

_His hawks now fly free in the hills_

_His lady has taken another to bed_

_Down, a-down, we go_

Down he went, indeed, with Catria singing him out of the world as a grandmother would sing a babe to sleep.

_And nothin' is left of a face once so fair_

_Down, a-down, we go_

_The ravens ha' bowered their nest with his hair_

_Down, a-down, we go_

She was silent, then, for a while-- or rather, she did not speak. Abel heard her all the same.

"Catria." It was an effort to say those three syllables. "I can't remember ever seeing you cry...."

"Well, Abel," she said, wiping at her eyes. "You simply missed out on all the worst moments of my life."

A strange unconcern had taken ahold of Abel by then, as though his mind and body alike were turning rapidly to wood, or stone, or something else without feeling. And so he asked, again, a forbidden question, without fear of the consequences.

"What happened to Palla?" He knew of her appointment to high office in Macedon, but couldn't remember ever hearing of her death. He'd not wanted ever to know, not until Catria summoned an entire procession of phantoms into his life. Or, perhaps, dragged his own shade back to the realm of the living.

"Palla got over you in the end. Took her nigh on a decade, but she managed it."

"I am... glad of that."

Another silence followed, during which Catria seemed to collect herself.

"She forgave you, Abel." He knew this time she wasn't speaking of Palla. "She still loved you. She just couldn't undo what was already done."

He answered her with only a smile, born of the gratitude that she cared enough for him to lie to him now. She gave him one last fancy he might cling to for his salvation, but he didn't latch on to it. His wife, real or imagined, was as far away from him now as the rose-tinged clouds of a sunset. So far away, out past the winds and the stars that gave light without any warmth....

"And Abel... if you could do one thing for me? As my reward?" Her voice, though low, was charged with some brittle emotion. Her eyes glittered, and for one mad moment she appeared to him as Est on their wedding day. "Tell him it was Catria that brought you home."

He didn't understand at first. He was thinking of Est, and of Palla, and it was long seconds before his befogged brain understood whom the message was even for.

"Ah," he breathed, as he saw Catria's meaning. Abel closed his eyes.

He'd always planned to save his final breath for Est, to speak her name one last time in hopes that she would hear, and be waiting for him. So he had intended through the long decades of his exile-- but in the end, he expended that breath on the friend, on the sister, who sat at his side and placed her hand upon his head.

"I'll tell him... Catria. Thank you."

Abel reached out at last for the forgiveness that had always been extended to him, grasped it, and was made whole.

**The End**

_Author Note, Explanation, and Apology:_

I didn't mean to write this. It sort of kick-started itself, as a reaction to "The Golden Age." But once I started on a vignette of bustling Altea City, with its Guildhall and girls' school and poor Abel wandering through it like a sleepwalker, I couldn't stop. After the civil-war wreckage glimpsed in "The Golden Age," I fell in love with the idea of a man who runs away from a medieval-warrior society and comes back four decades later to find the Renaissance has happened without him. Windmills, transoceanic voyages, civic reform and revisionist history... postwar Archanea is a splendidly flawed paradise here, as opposed to the just plain flawed worlds of my other post-FE3 fics.

There are only two real voices in this narrative-- Abel, the fallen knight who placed love of a woman above his vows of duty, and Catria, the knight of the air who sublimated her passion for the man she couldn't have into a life of service. They have both failed by their own lights; Abel lost both his love and his honor when raised his weapon against his prince, while Catria led her lord to his death by following orders to the letter. This dual failure binds them together, even as the primary links between them-- Est, Marth, and Palla-- are profoundly absent. Abel, in Catria's care, turns from a shell of a man, passively awaiting his judgment, to someone who actively re-evaluates the ideals on which he's spent his life. And Catria, somewhat against her own will, shifts from being the Fury who pursues Abel to the ends of the continent to a somewhat sadistic Virgil who leads a reluctant Abel through Purgatory and drops him off at the entrance to Paradise.

This piece is more overtly "spiritual" than most of my writing, which is entirely intentional. Uncomfortable as it might be to a Western fan, FE canon forces on us that Marth-- aka Prince of Light, aka Starlord, aka King of All Kings, aka the Chosen One-- occupies a semi-divine place in Archanean society. As did Anri, except Anri didn't conquer the entire continent. Regardless of your personal feelings on Marth as a character, this is not something a writer can ignore. It's like Sailor Moon's role in her universe-- just accept that she's the Messiah, and roll with it.

And this factors into my treatment of Abel. Abel isn't just an ordinary knight who betrayed his prince in a moment of weakness. Abel is the designated Traitor to His Lord. Not the Wolfsguard-- they were always Hardin's men, just as Jeorge and Astram were always Nyna's sworn men. Abel doesn't just break his knight's oath, or break the law-- he commits an outright sin, a spiritual failing, and compounds it by running away. Running away after Est, to be sure, but the very fact that he lost Est should be punishment enough. Instead, he fails to accept that he no longer has any claim to Est, and pursues her. Imagine Orpheus driving Eurydice further into Hell.

I don't actually care for redemption narratives; they're generally cheap and unconvincing. Either the villain does a face-heel-turn and goes out in a blaze of glory, or a character whose crimes weren't really crimes to begin with gets a suitably creampuff redemption. The _Harry Potter_ fandom was terrible about these scenarios. Hopefully, this tale doesn't fall into either of those categories. The slow slipping-away of Abel's illusions, and the equally slow thawing of Catria's affections for him, should suffice for these good yet imperfect characters.

PS: Catria's musical interlude is a "Talysian" variant on the Scottish folk ballad "Twa Corbies."

PPS: Epigraph again from "The Law" by Leonard Cohen.


End file.
